As I mentioned before, next year I am going to teach low level students, so I am trying to prepare some materials which I will be able to use with them. A week ago I wrote a post on the verb to be in affirmative and negative sentences. In this post I would like to…
This post is about common mistakes in English. There are two pieces of interesting research into learning and teaching English. One of them says that students learn more if someone else is corrected by the teacher than if they are corrected. The other found out that students learn and remember more vocabulary if the words…
Next school year I am going to teach low level students, so I started to prepare materials for them. The first one deals with the verb to be in affirmative and negative sentences. The verb to be is the most important verb in English. You need it all the time. That is why solid knowledge…
In the previous post we could see that verbs usually go with one or more prepositions. In this post we are going to deal with two verbs which can be followed by two different prepositions with different meaning. These verbs are THROW and SHOUT. ADVERT: [showmyads] Both of these verbs can be followed by the…
Are you going to teach or learn the form “BE GOING TO” for expressing future? This post might come handy. There is a mind map explaining all the forms: Affirmative sentences, negative sentences and questions. This post is especially designed for elementary students who need to learn the form. There are two games to practise…
Yesterday I learnt Spanish and when I tried to reconstruct a text I found out that I do not remember the small words like articles and prepositions. They were so small that I did not pay enough attention to them to remember them. Interestingly my students have similar problems with prepositions in English. Therefore I…
The greatest thing that can happen to a teacher is the aha! moment when suddenly the students get it. And this happened to me on Thursday. I was teaching the modal verbs of deduction for a hundredth time and suddenly the students could understand it and use it correctly. Wonderful feeling!!! ADVERT: [showmyads] In this…
Students often use the wrong prepositions. So I have created this post in hope that this short explanation and practise will help them get at least some of the prepositions correct. ADVERT [showmyads] Many teachers claim that students use prepositions incorrectly because of interference from their mother tongue. It is true in many cases but…
My students are online all the time. Through the internet they are flooded with information, but whenever I ask them about any current affairs they know nothing. They have no idea who or what I am talking about. ADVERT: [showmyads] In my opinion, this “dementia” is caused by two factors. First, all the news on…
Many students struggle with reported speech. They feel that there are many rules they have to follow and they often get confused. In this post I try to simplify the rules about the reported speech (or indirect speech) as much as possible. There is mind map describing the basic rules, a video and two games…
In my last post I try to teach 11 common similes in English. However, as some students still feel that they need more practise, I have decided to produce this post too. This post contains a visually appealing demonstration of all the 11 similes, a short film to learn the phrases and a dictation exercise….
A year ago George Woolard published a book called Messaging. There he suggests that learners of a foreign language should learn the whole phrases and sentences. By learning the whole chunks the students will later be able to produce the language quicker and more precisely. ADVERT [showmyads] I think that I can agree with this…
Many verbs in English are often followed by the same preposition. Therefore it is best to learn them togehter from the beginning. However, even if you do this it is neccessary to sum it up from time to time. ADVERT [showmyads] The following summary was created for my elementary students of English and it contains…
Recently I have published a post on giving advice. And our post on modal verbs won the British Council blog award. This post will deal with three ways to express the modal verb SHOULD. The different means are HAD BETTER and OUGHT TO. Both of these have the same meaning as SHOULD. This grammar point…
First conditional is very similar to time clauses. However, I would say that first conditional is easier than time clauses. First conditional is used if we speak about two possibilities in the future. After the conjunction IF we use present simple tense and in the other clause we use WILL. You can see the explanation…
Have you ever tried to memorise the following list of verbs to know when you should use TO and when the ending ING? ADVERT: [showmyads] Honestly, I have never been able to commit the list to memory. And even when I thought that I know the verbs I was not really sure which form follows…
Phrasal verbs make many students feel hopeless. Even advanced students struggle with them and to be honest, I am not very comfortable with them either. Moreover, they seem very hard to memorise. That is why I have prepared the following post. There is a story where all the verbs are used. Thus you can see…
For and since are often given as the key words which signal that present perfect tense should be used. It is not 100% true but it makes life easier for elementary and lower intermediate students. However, sometimes it is difficult for learners to know which word they should use. The rule is simple. FOR is…
There are many ways to speak about future in English. We have already dealt with two ways here. In the first blog we tried to distinguish between Will and MAY and Might on the basis of certainty that an event will happen. ADVERT: [showmyads] In this post I would like to demonstrate the difference between…
I remember struggling with this grammar when I was at secondary school. As it is possible to translate the words IF and WITH with the same word in my mother tongue I couldn’t see the difference in English. ADVERT: [showmyads] To help my students avoid this problem I have created the following mind map and…